The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  On 3 October a royalist riot at Dreux, 40 miles to the west, was dispersed with violence. When news of the incident reached the capital the next day, a call was issued for representatives of all the sections to meet to plan joint action. Only fifteen appeared, an ominously tepid turnout, and even then no action was agreed. The Convention hurriedly outlawed such meetings and stationed troops with cannon at strong points throughout the city. Even so, on the morning of 4 October (12 Vendémiaire) seven sections declared themselves to be in insurrection and mobilized their National Guard units. Regular soldiers sent that evening against section Le Peletier, the centre of resistance, accepted promises of disarmament and withdrew. The promises were not kept. The next morning, therefore, 25,000 insurgents converged on the Convention, mostly from south of the river. They were stopped by troops who had invested the main bridges on the orders of the deputy Barras—advised in turn by the 26-year-old artillery general Bonaparte. All afternoon the two sides faced each other, but at 4.30 the Convention’s cannon opened fire. The insurgents had no cannon; indeed, so effectively had Paris been disarmed after Prairial that even those who had rifles were short of powder and shot. Nevertheless, the Convention had only 6,000 troops, and once the fighting had begun, rebel sections north of the river threw their forces into the balance, and the battle lasted 6½ hours. Isolated skirmishes continued until the morning of the sixth. It took more than the ‘few shells’ vaunted by Bonaparte to win the day for the Convention, and when it was over hundreds lay dead.

  It was the last time Paris attempted to impose its will on the national representatives. And although troops had been prominent in mopping up after Prairial, it was the first time the army had been unleashed against unrest in the capital since the Reveillon riots of April 1789. The Vendémiaire uprising was therefore much more of a turning-point than the end of the Convention and inauguration of the constitution of the Year III, which took place three weeks later, on 27 October. The one clear aim of the rebels had been to prevent the operation of the Two Thirds Law in the elections scheduled for the second week in October. Their failure meant that 500 members of the Convention duly took their seats (although only 394 by election) in the new Councils, from where they could prolong the spirit and policies of the Thermidorian Convention until reduced to a minority in the spring elections of 1797. The first Directors chosen were not surprisingly from their ranks, too. Barras, a slippery ex-noble, was a natural choice after his role in Vendémiaire. Sieyès now resurfaced after years of prudent silence, but refused to preside over a system not of his own devising. His place was taken by Carnot, whose prestige as a military organizer outweighed his terroristic record. La Revellière-Lépeaux, Reubell, and Letourneur were as yet unknown quantities, chosen for their republicanism—thus far more proven than their abilities. The policy they would pursue remained that which had emerged over the summer of 1795. When Jacobinism threatened, clubs would be closed and suspected terrorists rounded up, as after Prairial. When royalism seemed the danger, curbs would be imposed on the well-funded right-wing press, while Jacobin papers would receive subsidies. Sansculottes in detention would be released and encouraged to open clubs. Clemency to the recently execrated terrorists marked the Convention’s response to the Vendémiaire crisis, both in the build-up to the insurrection and in its aftermath. Indeed, rumours of the renewed favour enjoyed by Jacobins did much to help precipitate the rising, and some newly released veterans of Prairial served as volunteers alongside Barras’s soldiers. Yet the repression after Vendémiaire did not match that after Prairial. No efforts were made to prevent known ring-leaders fleeing the city, and only two of those arrested were executed. For, despite the Convention’s propaganda, it was far from certain that most of those involved were royalists. Much clearer was that they included many people of property and substance, who might be wooed from their leanings towards monarchy if the new constitution could provide the security they craved. The most resolute steps taken after Vendémiaire, therefore, struck not at those involved but at the apparatus which both they and their sansculotte predecessors had used to mount insurrections ever since 1792. Thus on 10 October sectional assemblies were abolished, along with the National Guard organization which they had controlled. A new, centrally controlled Parisian Guard took its place, designed to be an instrument of the government rather than the governed. It was now clear above all, however, that the supreme instrument of government, at home as well as abroad, was the army. True, the constitution excluded all regular troops from a radius of 60 kilometres round the capital. But the Directory could not have begun as its architects intended without military help, and it was soon to recognize that it needed that help to survive, too.

  The most pressing problems facing the Directors as they installed themselves in the chilly, dilapidated, and unfurnished Luxembourg palace on 1 November were economic. The harvest of 1795 brought little relief to the famine conditions of the spring. The savage winter had meant grain was sown late, and it failed to swell during the unusually dry summer. While the British blockade disrupted imports from overseas, the best of domestic produce continued to be requisitioned for the armies. All basic foodstuffs, candles, and firewood were strictly rationed (although the black market flourished) and the first frosts of what was to be another exceptionally cold winter arrived early, at the beginning of November. On top of all this came the final, catastrophic collapse of the assignats. They had reached 1 per cent of their face value by the time the Directory began. A month later in Paris bread was costing 50 livres a pound, butter 100, coffee 250, soap 170. ‘The price of everything is excessive’, noted a Parisian diarist.3 ‘No more order, no more supervision, everybody free to sell what he has for whatever he wants … It really seems as if the time has come at last to die of hunger and cold, lacking everything. Great God, what a Republic! And the worst of it is, one can’t tell when or how it will end. Everybody is dying of hunger.’

  On 19 October the floor of the printing house where assignats were produced collapsed with the activity of the presses, which were turning out 2,000 millions worth of paper money per month. Specie had completely disappeared. On arriving in Normandy in February 1796 the Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone noticed that coinage was actually refused on the presumption that it could not be genuine. Landlords had in any case been authorized to take half their rents in kind since the summer, and the salaries of the Directors themselves and other public officials were expressed in the constitution in measures of grain rather than money. Debtors did well in these circumstances, paying off their creditors in currency worth quite literally less than the paper it was printed on. The greatest debtor of all was the government itself, simply meeting its commitments by printing what was required. But the government was also a creditor, receiving only its own worthless paper back in taxes, despite attempts to make taxpayers account for half in coin or kind. Even a ‘war rate’ (25 October) designed simply to mop up surplus assignats by demanding a paper contribution twenty times the value of assessed taxes made no impact on the problem, while a forced loan in specie decreed six weeks later (6 December), in order to draw hoarded coinage back into circulation to the tune of 600 millions, had only yielded 116 millions four months later. Much of that had come in in the end in the form of discounted assignats which were at once reissued. There were over 34,000,000,000 livres worth still in circulation when, in February 1796, it was finally decided to print no more. On the nineteenth, a solemn public bonfire of the broken plates used to produce them was lit in the place Vendôme.

  Yet even supposing this gesture succeeded, returning to specie would take time. To bridge the gap, it was at first proposed to establish a land bank issuing notes on the credit of still unsold national lands. Ramel, the newly appointed finance minister, had been well connected in banking circles since before 1789, and now tried to put together a consortium of financiers to launch the new institution. But the suspicion of banks which had kept France without one since the great crash of 1720 was still virulent, especially in Jac
obin circles eternally hostile to speculators. A furious journalistic campaign led by Lindet, who had managed the controlled economy of the Year II and now ran a newspaper, L’Ami des lois, led to the scheme’s rejection by the Councils. Instead they adopted what were in effect the assignats by another name, the ‘territorial mandates’ redeemable in national lands or in assignats still in circulation, at the rate of 30:1. But their value in relation to land was fixed at the levels of 1790, long undermined by the unprecedented amount of property thrown on to the market during the intervening years. Moreover, three times as many were issued as the entire face value of the assignats still in circulation. The result was that even on their first day of issue they were being discounted at 18 per cent of their face value, and by midsummer they were as worthless as the assignats. Ceasing to be legal tender on 17 July, in four months they had run the course which took the assignats five years. But those months proved a remarkable opportunity for speculators in national property, who bought in worthless paper and resold or leased for coin: far more of a profiteers’ paradise than the bank which deputies as yet refused to countenance. Enormous profits were also made by the private company which contracted to withdraw the remaining paper from circulation over the winter of 1796–7. But by 4 February 1797, when the mandates were officially demonetized, the revolutionary experiment with paper money was at an end.

  The speculative fortunes being made in these chaotic conditions could only reinforce resentment at the privations ordinary people were forced to endure for a second exceptionally lean year. Such popular discontents in turn were fertile soil for the Jacobins, whose fortunes continued to revive rapidly in the aftermath of Vendémiaire. Although 68 ‘terrorist’ deputies suspected of being too left-wing had on 22 August been declared ineligible for the directorial Councils, they were not excluded from other political activity. Others joined them when an amnesty proclaimed to mark the start of the Directory brought the release from prison of the remainder of those arrested after Prairial. They were soon meeting regularly, and Jacobin journalists like Lindet, or Duval, publisher of the Journal des hommes libres, found that discreet governmental subsidies were available They were even allowed to establish a club: the Pantheon Club was founded on 16 November, and was soon able to boast over a thousand members.

  The next day the most eloquent journalistic agitator of the previous year, Babeuf, began once more to produce his Tribun du peuple. But whereas many Jacobins were prepared to accept favours from a government that seemed at least firmly republican, Babeuf was intransigent from the very moment of his release under the amnesty. ‘What’, he asked,4 ‘is the French Revolution? An open war between patricians and plebeians, between rich and poor.’ Until the fall of Robespierre the poor had made considerable progress in this struggle. Since then it had been one long retreat. But now Babeuf went even further. During his months in prison he had come to the conclusion that there would be no true equality until property itself was abolished. Common ownership and equal distribution of goods should be the proper aim of the State, which it should pursue if necessary by terroristic methods far more fierce than any seen in France so far. Meanwhile the first step would be to implement the constitution of 1793. And it was this now classic demand, rather than the full-blooded communism of which he was the first active exponent in modern times, that struck the most immediate chords with Babeuf’s contemporaries. Within weeks the Tribun du peuple was selling 2,000 copies, and was being read not only in Paris clubs and cafés, but in circles composed of former terrorists in provincial towns all over northern France, and some much further afield. After only two issues the government tried to arrest the author, but sansculotte sympathizers spirited him into hiding, from where he continued to produce the journal. As much of his fury was directed against the fickleness of his fellow Jacobins as against the Directory, and for a time that cut him off from the Pantheon Club and other groups prepared to rub along with the new regime. But when his wife was arrested for distributing the paper, Jacobin opinion in general swung his way, and her release after three weeks failed to reopen the division. By the middle of February 1796 the Pantheon Club was giving thunderous applause to readings of Babeuf’s journal which denounced the Directors as tyrants. At the theatres, fierce patriotic pieces sustained these sentiments. ‘I never knew what enthusiasm was before’,5 noted the newly arrived Wolfe Tone, moved to tears. Understanding no French, he little knew that the ballets he was attending were a form of Jacobin rally. Lindet’s campaign against the proposed bank, along with vocal popular resentment against steadily diminishing bread and meat rations, began to look like a co-ordinated challenge to government. ‘It’s a fine bugger of a republic for robbers,’ shouted women queueing outside a wine shop on 10 February,6 ‘first they guillotine us, now they make us die of hunger. What’s more, Robespierre didn’t let us waste away, he only brought death to the rich; this lot are letting people die every day!’

  In fact the policy of conciliating the Jacobins to keep the monarchists at bay seemed to be getting beyond control; and on 27 February it was brusquely reversed. Five clubs and a theatre were closed, including the Pantheon, cleared by soldiers under the command of Bonaparte. A few days later a purge began to expel Jacobin suspects from posts of authority. On 16 April, advocacy of the constitution of 1793 was made a capital crime. Faced with renewed persecution from a regime some had hoped they could live with, the Jacobins now turned instinctively to insurrection. But a classic sansculotte journée was out of the question. The machinery through which such mass demonstrations had been put together no longer existed. Even the 48 sections had now been replaced by twelve more amorphous arrondissements. During his months in prison, however, Babeuf had become increasingly attracted by the idea of seizing power by a coup d’état rather than mass confrontation. In the course of March and April he and a group of victims of the Year II (including Buonarroti, once a middle-ranking official of the Terror, later to achieve fame as the chronicler of this conspiracy) established an insurrectional committee. Its aim was to co-ordinate the energies of ‘democrats’ throughout the capital, and secretly to subvert the Police Legion, which had now replaced the National Guard as the main force of law and order in the city. Approaches were also planned to military units. The idea was that when the signal was given for a rising, there could be no resistance, since the forces of order would join it. An ‘Insurrectionary Act’ was prepared, and even printed. It proclaimed, in the name of Equality, Liberty, and the Common Happiness, that sovereignty had been usurped by a faction of conspirators (the members of the Convention who still dominated the Councils) whom French democrats now intended to overthrow and ‘judge’. Once in power, the ‘Equals’ would bring into effect the constitution of 1793, organize free distributions of bread, and implement the Laws of Ventôse Year II to distribute national lands to needy patriots. There would be no mercy to the usurpers. Heads, gloated one veteran of the Terror, would ‘fall like hail [with] tripes and bowels scattered about the pavement’.7 But before these vengeful fantasies could be fulfilled, the conspiracy was betrayed by one of its own members, along with the hiding place of Babeuf and other leading Equals. They had already lost perhaps their best opportunity to strike. When on 28 April certain units of the Police Legion mutinied, they insisted that their ‘Day of the People’ must remain 19 May. So the mutiny was put down (eventually with 17 executions), and on 10 May Babeuf and Buonarroti were arrested. Other Equals were brought in on subsequent days. Altogether there were 128 arrests, 48 of them in the provinces. The ringleaders were imprisoned, like the ‘tyrant’ whose memory they so much execrated, in the Temple.

  It was the spring of 1797 before they were brought to trial. Carnot, the Director responsible for smashing the conspiracy, was determined to secure convictions at all costs, and the excuse that one of the conspirators was a deputy (Drouet, the man who had identified Louis XVI at Varennes) was used to send all of them before a specially constituted high court. Drouet escaped in August, but arrangements went ahea
d for the court to sit at Vendôme, far from the Paris populace the plotters had hoped to propel into action. In the meantime the exposure of the conspiracy brought further anti-Jacobin repression. The subscription-list of the Tribun du peuple found among Babeuf’s papers provided an obvious roll-call of suspects, who were duly harassed and removed from any positions of influence they might hold. The suspect Police Legion was dissolved—another step towards making the government completely dependent on the army. But was the army reliable? Babeuf and his fellow conspirators had always believed the troops could be subverted, and that belief continued in Jacobin circles even after the conspiracy’s collapse. Ten thousand bored and underpaid troops were encamped at Grenelle, near the Champ de Mars, dreaming enviously of comrades now winning spectacular and glorious victories in Italy, and being paid by their general in plundered coin. Rumours of mutiny among them circulated throughout the summer; and dubious elements were periodically discharged. But when on 9 September several hundred Jacobins marched to Grenelle expecting a dragoon regiment to defect to them, informers in their ranks had alerted the authorities, and the soldiers charged the marchers with drawn swords. Twenty were cut to pieces, and another thirty of those arrested then or subsequently were shot after military trials. By then Babeuf and his co-conspirators, secure in iron cages on wheels, had been transported to Vendôme to face less summary but—the Directors hoped—just as inevitable justice.